Decades ago, “containerization” transformed the shipping industry and introduced globalization to physical supply chains. Could new technology lead history to repeat itself with digital and social supply chains?

1. 1
Today’s businesses implicitly operate across a combination of three different value chains:
the physical value chain of components and products, the digital value chain of information
and processes, and the social value chain of community and insight. During the 1960s,
1970s and 1980s, the physical value chain underwent seismic upheavals due to the intro-
duction of standardized steel containers within logistics processes (a development known as
“containerization”). This transformation reduced the costs of supplier integration and drove
the emergence of global supply chains. We believe that the continued evolution of the Web
as a communications platform – coupled with the realignment and commoditization of the
IT industry via cloud computing – means that the digital and social value chains are now on
the verge of second and third-wave transformations that will be every bit as disruptive.
When an ungainly converted oil tanker that had been rechristened the “Ideal X” drifted into Port of Houston in
1958 carrying just 58 containers, few of the invited dignitaries and curious workers who stopped to watch its
arrival would have guessed that they were witnessing the start of a new global order. But over the next 30 years,
the process of containerization started by that maiden voyage would go on to decimate traditional shipping
industries, fundamentally change the way in which businesses created and distributed goods and reconfigure the
global economy.
A Scenario of Disruptive Change:
Understanding the Emergence of the Next
Business Platform
Decades ago, “containeri-
zation” transformed the
shipping industry and
introduced globalization
to physical supply chains.
Could history repeat itself
with digital and social
supply chains?
Dr. Ian Thomas
Strategy Director,
Fujitsu Enabling Software Technologies
“The long-term
effects of cloud
platform emer-
gence will be
profound.”

2. 2
To understand how this happened, we must first consider the difficulties associated with the shipping of
goods prior to containerization. There was little or no standardization and goods were packaged in
boxes, bags or loose depending on the preferences of each supplier. On the supply side, each mode of
transport had its own methods and cost structures for moving this huge variety, and each mode relied
heavily on manual labor at the many hand-over points at which goods were unloaded and reloaded in
different ways. Consequently, moving goods was incredibly complex, costly and uncertain.
These obstacles prohibited the establishment of extended supply chains – especially on a global scale.
The high costs, risks and unreliability of shipping the components required for integration encouraged
companies to co-locate as much of their production as possible. Businesses operated large factories
near their customers and used their overall organizational mass (i.e. scale across a wide breadth of
capabilities) as a competitive barrier.
Business Aggregation Transaction Costs of Leveraging External Capabilities Supply Chain
Transaction CostsKey
Vertical Value Chain Integration Pre–1960s
High
Low
Time
Social Value Chain
(community & insight)
Digital Value Chain
(Information & processes)
Physical Value Chain
(components & products)
Social Digital Physical
Cost
Co-location of all capabilities to avoid
costs of integration & coordination
Containerization as a business platform for physical supply chains
The genius of container pioneers, like Malcolm Maclean, was not in inventing a new kind of box, but
rather in understanding one fundamental idea: Customers just wanted to reliably move goods from one
place to another; they didn’t care about the internals of the process or about protecting the multitude of
traditional industries involved.
Although simple in hindsight, this idea was revolutionary. It presupposed the design of a new and fully
integrated end-to-end system. Goods needed to be packed into standardized containers to remove vari-
ation and allow wholesale automation across the complete process. Ships, trucks, trains and ports all
had to be re-designed.
This re-focusing on outcomes unleashed waves of innovation as the process of shipping was integrated,
streamlined and automated from start to finish, thus generating immense economies of scale. The cost,
reliability and timeliness of what emerged totally destroyed the legacy shipping industry with all of its
inefficiencies, disconnects and unreliability. In its place, containerization delivered a new “business inte-
gration platform,” if you will, for physical supply chains.
Disruptive change extended far beyond shipping
As the costs of integrating global suppliers and customers fell, so did the value of existing business
models built around aggregation and co-location. Land and labor costs became the dominant factors
instead of shipping costs. Countries like Japan, and later China, leveraged these changes to become
global economic superpowers. Most importantly, however, the ability to integrate physical value chains
reliably and cheaply drove specialization, making supply chains ever longer, more complex and more
globalized. In this way, the new business platform that containerization provided drove the formation

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of new kinds of business ecosystems. In this new economic environment, specialization, component
integration and supply-chain coordination replaced vertical integration and co-location to become the
new critical competencies for the physical value chain.
Containerization can, therefore, be considered the first wave of globalization. It changed the basis of
competition within the physical value chain. It turned carefully crafted advantages of organizational
mass, physical proximity to customers and vertical integration into disadvantages that dragged many
organizations into oblivion.
Business Aggregation Transaction Costs of Leveraging External Capabilities Supply Chain
Transaction CostsKey
Physical Supply Chain Liberation 1960–2000
High
Low
Time
Digital Value Chain
(Information & processes)
Social Digital Physical
Cost
Containers
Container Ships
Intermodal Transport
Mega Ports
Large Scale Automation
Logistics Providers
Component-Based Manufacturing
Physical
Lower costs of global shipping drives
specialization across physical values chain
Global Logistics Platform
Social Value Chain
(community & insight)
Physical Value Chain
(components & products)
The second and third waves – transformation of the digital and social value chains
Fast-forward to the present day, and most people looking at early cloud platforms and services would
see something akin to the “Ideal X” – familiar technologies delivered with some new characteristics.
Once again, people stand on the threshold of a new global order and see only a jerry-rigged ship rather
than the transformational direction of travel it embodies.
Today’s IT industry has much in common with the shipping industry at the dawn of containerization.
There is little or no standardization in the way that businesses design, build and operate their systems;
each company has an IT organization that largely sets its own standards. On the supply side, the
companies that provide technology and services (e.g. hardware, middleware, applications and
managed services) each have their own tools, methods and cost structures. Solutions are painstakingly
assembled in a way that relies heavily on manual labor at the many hand-over points. Taken in sum,
these realities mean that the process of developing solutions often results in single-tenant systems that
are too fragile, unreliable and costly to be used beyond the tightly controlled environment of a single
enterprise.
Together, these issues have left little room for building systems that can be shared across many organi-
zations. Consequently, they have offered only limited opportunities for specialization within the digital
and social value chains. The high costs, risks and unreliability of building business services for integra-
tion has largely encouraged companies to co-locate much of their business-process and knowledge
work within large organizations. That leads them to operate “information factories” and to use their
overall organizational mass as a competitive barrier
Cloud as a business platform for digital and social supply chains
As with Malcolm Maclean’s reframing of the value boundary for shipping, cloud computing is beginning
to reframe the IT industry around outcomes. In simple terms, many early general-purpose services –
such as Salesforce and Netsuite – have demonstrated the viability of delivering multi-tenant services
globally and at scale for use within limited forms of a digital supply chain. At the same time, large-scale

4. 4
social and collaborative services – such as Facebook and Wikipedia – have demonstrated the potential
of social supply chains by enabling highly distributed communities to work together in new ways.
Current examples like these are very much early outliers. However, they demonstrate the potential of
digital and social supply chains in much the same way that the “Ideal X” demonstrated the potential of
containerization. To really scale digital and social supply chains, we need to build the new end-to-end
platforms that will standardize, automate and streamline the realization of businesses’ intended
outcomes – i.e. the creation, monetization and distribution of their valuable business IP. And this has
already begun to happen.
While still at a very low level of abstraction, emerging cloud infrastructure platforms – such as those
offered by Fujitsu and Amazon – are early demonstrations of the viability of realigning a broad range
of previously fragmented technologies (including hardware, middleware, management and services)
into an integrated and streamlined platform service that allows organizations to focus wholly on their
intended solution rather than on the enabling technology. In the same way that containerization ulti-
mately became a platform for integrating business processes within the physical supply chain – by
jointly optimizing all of the required technologies and processes around outcomes – we believe that
these emerging cloud platforms will ultimately expand in scope to become a platform for the end-to-
end realization and monetization of a range of complex business service types (e.g. infrastructures,
applications, business processes and full business services).
The next generation of digital platforms has the potential to optimize all of the technologies and
processes required to enable the end-to-end creation, operation, monetization and sharing of scalable
and multi-tenant digital and social services. Along the way, they will hide all of this complexity behind
high-productivity modeling and development environments that focus on outcomes.
What this means for us today – the impact of digital platforms
As with containerization and its dramatic impact on the structure of companies operating physical
supply chains, we believe that the long-term effects of cloud-platform emergence will be profound –
particularly for information and knowledge-intensive industries. Even those companies operating
­physical value chains will not escape these 2nd
and 3rd
-wave disruptions, however, as physical assets
increasingly become connected, digitized and available as a service.
One of the most profound effects of the digitization and socialization of individual business capabilities
will be a need to rethink the purpose of the firm across two different dimensions. One dimension
concerns the shifts in business model required as external digital and social services become available
for integration and remixing. The other concerns the more fundamental impacts of digitization as such
digital and social services become the de facto external expression of an organization’s capabilities.
Business Aggregation Transaction Costs of Leveraging External Capabilities Supply Chain
Transaction CostsKey
Digital Supply Chain Liberation 1990–2020
High
Low
Time
Digital Value Chain
(Information & processes)
Social Digital Physical
Cost
Web 1.0
SOA & Web services
Virtualization
Multi-Tenancy
Process Automation
Cloud Business Platforms
SaaS & BPaaS
Digital
Global online information systems drive
specialization across digital value chain
Global Cloud Platform
Global Logistics Platform
Social Value Chain
(community & insight)
Physical Value Chain
(components & products)

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Business Aggregation Transaction Costs of Leveraging External Capabilities Supply Chain
Transaction CostsKey
Social Supply Chain Liberation 2005–2025
High
Low
Time
Digital Value Chain
(Information & processes)
Social Digital Physical
Cost
Web 2.0
Mobility
Open Information
Social networks
Gamification
Human Computation
Crowdsourcing
Social
Network & community tools drive
specialization across social value chain
Global Social Platform
Global Cloud Platform
Global Logistics Platform
Social Value Chain
(community & insight)
Physical Value Chain
(components & products)
Firstly, the ability to access specialized physical, digital and social services consistently via the global
network will mean that the purpose of the firm will no longer be to minimize the transaction costs of
doing business by gaining scale and executing efficient in-house processes. Instead, in accordance with
our experiences within the physical value chain, we believe that the successful company of the future
will be as small as possible and will focus on building world-class digital and social value webs. They
will do this by specializing, integrating external capabilities and employing cloud platforms to achieve
core digital transformation (i.e. the digital encoding of their own specialized business capabilities as
applications, processes and services for sharing with others). Again, as with physical value chains, we
believe that integrating and orchestrating specialized providers within extended supply chains will
­radically improve outcomes to an extent that no individual organization could hope to achieve alone.
Secondly, such a “core digital transformation” changes the relationship between business and tech-
nology. In the past, organizations used IT as one of several non-core tools for increasing the scale and
efficiency with which they executed traditional in-house processes. IT was effectively one of the “imple-
mentation technologies” underpinning the creation and execution of business capabilities. However,
the shift to cloud has a profound impact here, too.
As business capabilities of all kinds are increasingly becoming digitized and socialized, these digital
services come to encode and encapsulate a company’s core IP. This change requires businesses to
reframe the way that they think about IT: The emergence of cloud is not simply a different way of
purchasing IT but rather a paradigm shift allowing technology to align more closely to the needs of the
business. That transformation then enables them to share and monetize their valuable core IP within
new digital and social supply chains.
The implications of these two shifts will be profound.
The advantage goes to the agile
The digital platforms of the future will allow the accelerated delivery and low-cost scaling of a com–
pany’s specialization without requiring the firm to scale the size of the organization and its available
resources. Being big will, therefore, slowly cease to be a competitive weapon. Smaller companies will
take advantage of greater agility, world-class specialized services, and the web’s natural cost transpar-
ency to become hyper-competitive. If the pattern of change brought by the shipping container repeats

6. 6
For a successful restaurant chain, opening new branches is a key business activity. It is crucial that
diners enjoy a consistent, brand-enhancing experience at each location. But this is easier said
than done, especially if the company wishes to expand into different countries.
One rapidly growing Japanese food and beverages chain with restaurants throughout South East
Asia is addressing this challenge by embracing the digital supply chain. By using Fujitsu’s SaaS
business-support solution for the food-service industry, they are able to achieve unified manage-
ment of their overseas restaurants, delivering a consistent mechanism for tasks such as ordering,
inventory tracking, and sales management from any country.
Consolidating operational services in the cloud ensures that each restaurant’s ordering process is
consistent and systematic. At headquarters, managers can track each restaurant’s sales and profits
in real time and make decisions quickly. By leveraging Fujitsu’s SaaS services, the restaurant chain
is able to exploit standardized functions encoded within the digital services and to focus more
tightly on its own specialization – delivering great culinary experiences to their customers.
Furthermore, the on-demand and shared nature of such digital services means that the firm is
able to quickly open and scale new restaurants in a consistent way while enjoying all of the bene-
fits of a single view of their operating information.
Expanding a Brand Overseas
itself with digital platforms, we might speculate that huge opportunities lie in wait for those companies
that can adapt to and exploit them. The container brought with it the potential for any manufacturing
company, regardless of its location, to be competitive on the global stage. It is likely that digital and
social supply chains will have a similar effect, unleashing new value for those that are willing to
embrace it.
For Further Thought
■ What lessons can your company learn from the fate of the firms that were on the losing end of
the first wave of changes to the value chain?
■ Is your company positioned to take advantage of the standardization, automation and stream-
lining of IT?
■ How can you prepare your company for the agility that this digital transformation will be
bringing to your industry?
■ What does your company have to do to achieve the core digital transformation required to
remain competitive in the emerging environment?